Early on in 2007 if you talked to someone about the PS3’s “potential” you probably discussed games like Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword or Factor 5’s Lair. Those games had some pretty stunning visuals from all the media we’d been shown. A lot of folks wrote off Heavenly Sword as Goddess of War (and it ended up being received as a great, albeit short game), but Lair… Lair didn’t really have an obvious “it’s like <insert name>” game to speak of. It promised a more unique gaming experience. It promised to be a showpiece game for the PS3. It promised a lot more than it delivered.

Lair was positioned by Factor 5 as “the” game to show us the extra level of immersion SIXAXIS motion control could bring to next-gen gaming. Factor 5’s Julian Eggebrecht explained how holding the SIXAXIS controller was like holding the actual reins of a dragon (because you know, dragon’s are real and he’s actually ridden one.)

Reminisce about this failure after the jump…

Mixed reports trickled in from the gaming media over how Lair played (I think most people would admit at some point that the game looks decent enough.) Concern grew when the game finally hit retail… a few days early of its release date… without print reviews… without playable demos on the Playstation Network… well, let’s just say my Spider senses were tingling. Correction, my Craptacular senses were tingling.

When a developer tries to slide a game onto shelves without any press coverage, it usually means even they know it stinks. They’re trying to make the most out of every minute of shelf space, before the reviews hit and sales dry up intellectual discussions during a Halo 3 multiplayer game. If that was even possible.

When end-user reports of Lair’s gameplay first trickled in, little pieces of even the most die-hard PS3 supporter’s heart died. I mean seriously, how do you screw up a dragon game? As I think back, the only dragon games I didn’t care for were the Spyro the Dragon games after Insomniac quit making them and even those later Spyro games are much more desirable to me than Lair.

Making dragon games should be a pretty sure-fire way to capture people’s imagination; especially when they look as arguably awesome as Lair’s dragons do. If you pinned people down and forced them to single out one problem with the game, the problem was what the developers were trying to “showcase”… motion control. Sony and Factor 5 both swear Sony wasn’t behind the decision to use motion control (and ONLY motion control), but if anything, it made a mockery of the SIXAXIS controller’s new functionality.

The failure of Lair swoops and dives it’s way to number 24 on Sarcastic Gamer’s Top 100 Gaming Moments of 2007.

Click here for the rest of Sarcastic Gamer’s Top 100 Gaming Moments from 2007 all in one place!

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